ar relation, was thrown
into deep water, tied up in a sack together with a dog, a cock, a viper,
and a monkey, which were probably symbols of his wickedness, and must
have given him a lively time before death supervened. Similarly, the
English law, always so careful of domestic sanctitude in women, provided
that a wife who killed her husband should be dragged by a horse to the
place of execution and burnt alive. We need not recall the penalties
considered most suitable for the crime of religious difference--the
rack, the fire, the boiling oil, the tearing pincers, the embrace of the
spiky virgin, the sharpened edge of stone on which the doubter sat, with
increasing weights tied to his feet, until his opinions upon heavenly
mysteries should improve under the stress of pain. When we come to
rebellion, the ordinance of English law was more express. In the case of
a woman, the penalty was the same as for killing her husband--that crime
being defined as "petty treason," since the husband is to her the sacred
emblem of God and King. So a woman rebel was burnt alive as she stood,
head, quarters, and all. But male rebels were specially treated, as may
be seen from the sentence passed upon them until the reign of George
III.[1] These were the words that Judge Jeffreys and Scroggs, for
instance, used to roll out with enjoyable eloquence upon the dazed
agricultural labourer before them:

"The sentence of the Court now is that you be conveyed
from hence to the place from where you came, and from there
be drawn to the place of execution upon hurdles; that you be
hanged by the neck; that you be cut down alive; that your
bowels be taken out and burnt in your view; that your head
be severed from your body; that your body be divided into
four quarters, and your quarters be at the disposition of the
King: and may the God of infinite mercy be merciful to your
soul. Amen."

"Why all this cookery?" once asked a Scottish rebel, quoted by Swift.
But the sentence, with its confiding appeal to a higher Court than
England's, was literally carried out upon rebels in this country for at
least four and a half centuries. Every detail of it (and one still more
disgusting) is recorded in the execution of Sir William Wallace, the
national hero of Scotland, more generally known to the English of the
time as "the man of Belial," who was executed at Tyburn in 1305.[2] The
rebels of 1745 were, apparently, the last upon whom the full rit